Jeshua's Life

So, I'm sure you're all wondering what I've been up to since the last time I updated. I am only taking 3 classes this semester, so I thought maybe I'd have some time to update this blog more often, but as it turns out I haven't. One of the two reasons is that my classes are taking quite a bit of time. All three of them are upper-level ECE classes, which is not a good combination as far as workload goes. That alone, however, does not account for all of my time. For the other portion, I blame Joey.

See, last semester my brother managed to get two slots for the World of Warcraft Stress Test, and he gave one of them to me. I played it a bit during the stress test, and enjoyed it much more than I expected to, but I only had time to put in a few hours. A while later, they had an open beta test and I signed up. This time I had a bit more time on my hands, and spent a fair amount of time playing it.

The open beta test eventually ended, and I thought, "Well, that was fun, but I don't think I'm willing to pay the retail price and the monthly subscription fee when they release it." Shortly after, they released the game, and several of my brother's friends bought it. My brother ended up spending most of his time playing it, and I would often stand and watch him play for hours. Over Christmas vacation he didn't play as much as before, meaning that I could no longer watch him play every day. I eventually started wondering if I should just buy the game myself, rather than constantly watching him play. I was debating about buying it when I got an email from Jason, inviting me to join his guild in the game. See, Jason had been playing WoW, and Joey had told him that I had enjoyed the Beta. Joey's comment led Jason to email me, which in turn led me to purchase the game. It's all Joey's fault :)

Once I got the game, I played it almost non-stop until classes started. Now that classes have started I no longer have as much time to play. Two of my 3 classes are in the late afternoon, and the third is in the early morning, which means that I have my afternoons free, but I get back home fairly late at night. I've discovered that this semester when I get home I'm usually mentally exhausted, and don't have the energy to go play WoW even if I have the time.

One of my classes especially has been eating up my former WoW time. This class is the senior design project class. We are split up into teams of 6, and are given an FPGA (sort of a reprogrammable CPU for those of you who don't know) and have a semester to create something with it. In the past people have done things like a webserver, a Java processor, a Nintendo emulator, or a Sega Master System emulator (a friend of mine did this). The project has to be approved by the professor (basically to make sure it's not too easy or hard), but other than that it can be just about anything. My group has decided to create our own homebrew game console. We initially looked at emulating the SNES, but decided that there wasn't enough documentation about the video processor inside for us to be able to figure it out. Our system will have 2 main components: a simple 16-bit pipelined processor, and a graphical display unit. The processor can do basic instructions, but doesn't support multiplication or division in hardware. The video component uses a set of lookup tables to generate the screen image on the fly. These tables allow you to create tiled backgrounds and overlapping sprites (with invisibility). It's been an interesting project to plan out, and we are now in the process of moving from planning to execution of our plan. There have been many issues that we had to resolve in the planning stage of the processor, which has given us a bit more understanding about why the Intel architecture was so messed up. Our processor will have some of the things (like segmented memory) that we hated so much when we took classes that used the Intel architecture. I am currently working on an emulator of our processor, so that our team leader can start writing and debugging a game for it. Once that's done, I'll probably be involved in the creation of the video unit. This project has been a lot of fun so far, and I hope it stays that way.

My other classes this semester are a Cryptography course and a transistor-level design course. The Cryptography course is fairly interesting, but much of the mathematical theory goes over my head. The transistor course has been very めんどくさい (it's way too much physics and equations for my taste). Hopefully the project for that course will be somewhat interesting without being too annoying.